The words above are taken from a work by the Hungarian statesman Jozsef Eötvös (1813-1871) published in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions. Eötvös alludes to the novelty of the national ‘aspirations’ declared in the course of these and earlier upheavals, their diverse forms, and his difficulty in satisfactorily explaining the cause or causes of their relatively sudden appearance. Many of his contemporaries, including those with strong national convictions of their own, were similarly perplexed. As Adamantios Korais (1748-1833) wrote when trying to account for the rise of Greek national sentiment in his lifetime, ‘We see such a succession of cause and effect, such a concourse of varying circumstances, and yet all conspiring toward the same end, that it is quite impossible for me to assign to each its proper place in the sequence of events.’

The difficulties of these earlier figures may provide some consolation for modern researchers when struggling themselves to reconstruct how, and again in a rather short space of time, the nation became an object of major importance in questions of collective identity and power. So great in fact have been the changes rendered to the political geography of Europe in the intervening years that its modern history may simply be told, according to some, as the ‘history of nationalism.’ Still, analytical problems, not unlike those articulated by the figures mentioned above, continue to resonate in contemporary debates. These same dilemmas press heavily on the present work, which represents yet another attempt to lend some coherence to the story while avoiding the teleological lapses or faulty ‘methodological’ dispositions cited in connection with previous efforts.